Talk Notes: "Self-Care on Rails" (RailsConf 2021)

#techtalks #rails

✨ What is this post about: As a part of my professional growth, I make time to watch conference talks on Ruby, Rails, JS, React, tech writing, and tech trivia. Previously, I'd just watch them but now I will take and publish notes for future reference. This talk was a part of RailsConf 2021 that I'm participating at the time of writing.

✨ Talk: 'Self-Care on Rails' by @bengreenberg , or Ben Greenberg

✨ One-paragraph summary: This past year has been one of the most challenging years in recent memory. The pandemic has taken a toll, including on children. Adults used their professional skills to help make the year a little better for the kids in our lives: Therapists counseled, entertainers delighted, teachers educated... and Rails developers developed!

✨ Impression: I appreciate the human-side of the Rails community that Ben represents; the talk was inspiring and also grounding

Notes

"...citizens of a democracy are collectively responsible for what their society allows; they have a special duty towards those it systematically fails, and this burden falls most heavily on those most rewarded..." (Chiala Cordelli)
a new initiative in the Open Source community: Hippocratic License
- "...we are starting to realize that the software that we create has a real and lasting impact on the world in which we live" (An Ethical License to Open Source - how will your code be used? will it be bettering the world at large?
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?"
- self-interest can mean asserting yourself among others and that's not a bad thing!
- your interest is among others and it matters
We are facing mental health crises (loneliness, etc.) and it's affecting all of us: adults and youths alike
webRTC: real-time communication
- open web standard and available as regular JS APIs in the majority of browsers
- it supports video, voice, and generic data to be sent between peers
Ben mentioned two apps he built:
- a video-sharing app he built for his son's birthday party,
- a gem he published that uses web-scraping to automate school form submission (btw. his blog post on building this is amazing)
the more you help yourself, the more you help others ✨